As soon as I saw the provocative title of Ralph Richard Banks' book, "Is Marriage for White People?" I recognized the source:

It came from the headline over a 2006 Washington Post opinion piece that packed such a cultural jolt that I have long saved a copy. In it, the writer recalls the day a black sixth-grader told her in a class that he intended to be a good father but he dismissed marriage as being "just for white people."

It was a succinct take, from a youthful gaze, at just where the plummeting African-American marriage rate has brought us.

Banks rightly realized there were enough sociological issues loaded into that boy's declaration to fill a book. As he puts it: "Over the past half century, African Americans have become the most unmarried people in our nation. By far. We are the least likely to marry and the most likely to divorce; we maintain fewer committed and enduring relationships than any other group. Not since slavery have black men and women been as unpartnered as we are now."

Banks teaches at Stanford University Law School, but his tone is conversational. He lets statistics on race and marriage guide his readers through a hot-button issue, which he enlivens with dozens of interviews.

This isn't just a black thing. The marriage rate for all races is dropping, a shift in attitudes nationally. Today, marriage is no longer an economic necessity for working women. More finish gate than starting line, marriage is now associated with personal fulfillment, emotional intimacy and understanding, Banks writes.

Yet undeniably, African-Americans lead the trend. Nearly 7 in 10 black women are unmarried, and as many of 3 in 10 will never marry, according to 2007 Pew Research Center figures. Another Pew study, done in 2010, found that half of black couples divorce in the first decade of marriage, while less than a third of white couples do.

Banks discusses three factors contributing to a shortage of eligible black men: high incarceration rates; economic prospects that have worsened for black men while improving for black women; and black men's willingness to marry partners of other races, which black women are less likely to do.

Banks, who grew up in Cleveland, is sensitive to how the loss of blue-collar industrial jobs walloped the black marriage rate here.

Unwed childbearing, he writes, is one unwelcome consequence of marriage decline. But Banks argues that Bill Cosby is wrong to blame "the lower economic people." Moms in poverty don't marry for the same reason that many other women don't, he writes.

While pundits decry the unmarried black poor, Banks is fascinated by the fact that affluent blacks are also less likely than other middle-class Americans to wed or stay married.

He deflects the lore purveyed by Tyler Perry movies and a Nightline broadcast in which male panelists suggested that middle-class black women need to stop turning up their noses at less educated men.

Actually, the majority of married college-educated black women have husbands who did not graduate from college, according to Banks' book. And the writer breaks what feels like new ground by pointing out the serious stresses that occur in these mixed marriages.

He recounts the case of Tonya Hunter-Lyons, whose husband, ex-felon Maurice Lyons, pleaded guilty to raping and stabbing her to death last year. Hunter-Lyons, a respected family and marriage counselor working on her doctorate, believed she could help Lyons and told a Cleveland judge months before her death that "Maurice is a good husband."

It's an extreme example of the clash in relationships between partners of different socioeconomic backgrounds. As one black woman tells Banks, she's tired of being "Sister Save-A-Brotha."

Banks has provoked some criticism for his conclusion that black women should jettison their reservations about marrying men of other races. But reducing this well-researched book to that sound bite isn't fair.

"Is Marriage for White People?" is an in-depth look at an issue so serious that it threatens to reverse the gains made by the black middle class.

One unmarried, childless black graduate of Harvard and Yale summed it up woefully: "There's no one who can benefit from my legacy status. It amounts to nothing."

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